Eight percent of Americans legally drunk after professional sports games

First Posted: January 18, 2011

Researchers conducted breathalyzer exams on a total of 362 adults after 13 baseball games and three football games. Sixty percent of fans tested had a blood alcohol content level (BAC) of zero, 40 percent had a BAC under the legal driving limit of .08, and of that group, 8 percent blew above that legal limit.

Fans under 35 years of age have nine times greater odds of having BAC levels above the limit of .08.

Those who drink at tailgating parties have 14 times greater odds of being legally drunk, compared to fans who had not tailgated.

Nearly one in four attendees who tailgated reported consuming five or more alcoholic beverages while tailgating.

Quotes

“Our sample size was small, partly because of the difficulty of getting fans to submit to a BAC test after a game. But if we assume that our results accurately represent individuals attending professional events, it means that – on average – almost 5,000 attendees leaving one National Football League (NFL) event would be above the legal BAC limit for driving,” said Darin Erickson, Ph.D., principal investigator of the study in the University of Minnesota School of Public Health.

“That’s a lot of drunken individuals who could be involved in traffic accidents, assaults, vandalism, crime and other injuries,” Erickson said.

It appears American’s like to imbibe alcohol during sporting events. About half of attendees drink, while eight percent are legally drunk after the event. Tailgaters are most likely to be drunk.

Full Text

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (January, 18, 2011) – Nearly half of sports fans leaving professional baseball and football games consumed alcohol during the event, and eight percent of attendees are legally drunk when they leave, according to University of Minnesota School of Public Health research.

Researchers conducted breathalyzer exams on a total of 362 adults after 13 baseball games and three football games. Sixty percent of fans tested had a blood alcohol content level (BAC) of zero, 40 percent had a BAC under the legal driving limit of .08, and of that group, 8 percent blew above that legal limit.

The study is published online today in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research (ACER). The study is the first to measure BAC levels of fans after professional sporting events in America.

“Our sample size was small, partly because of the difficulty of getting fans to submit to a BAC test after a game. But if we assume that our results accurately represent individuals attending professional events, it means that – on average – almost 5,000 attendees leaving one National Football League (NFL) event would be above the legal BAC limit for driving,” said Darin Erickson, Ph.D., principal investigator of the study in the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. “That’s a lot of drunken individuals who could be involved in traffic accidents, assaults, vandalism, crime and other injuries.”

Other results from Erickson’s study found:

Fans under 35 years of age have nine times greater odds of having BAC levels above the limit of .08.

Those who drink at tailgating parties have 14 times greater odds of being legally drunk, compared to fans who had not tailgated.

Nearly one in four attendees who tailgated reported consuming five or more alcoholic beverages while tailgating.

Those who were in the highest BAC category reported consuming, on average, 6.6 drinks while tailgating compared with 3.7 drinks and 2.8 drinks for those in the mid-range BAC category and the zero BAC category, respectively.

Night game attendees had higher odds of having a mid-range BAC (not above the legal limit), but they were not significantly more likely to have a BAC above the legal limit.

Erickson said that better training of alcohol servers and increased police patrols around sports stadiums could help deter some of the drinking.

The study was funded by the Substance Abuse Policy Research Program (www.saprp.org) of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. SAPRP has funded research into policies related to alcohol, tobacco and illegal drugs. The study is available online and will appear in the April 2011 issue of ACER.